On December 1st, the digital currency market has been speculating on a major event for nearly a year, and "ETH2.0" finally ushered in the moment of launch. At 20 o'clock that night, the much-watched ETH 2.0 beacon chain genesis block was officially launched.
The goal of ETH2.0 is to improve its scalability, security and programmability. According to its plan, the upgrade route of the ETH network is roughly divided into three steps, namely the PoS beacon chain, multi-sharding and state execution. Currently, only the first step of the upgrade has been completed. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, said not long ago that after the upgrade is completed in the future, the TPS of the ETH network is expected to increase to 25,000 to 100,000. However, industry insiders believe that ETH2.0 still has a long way to go. If the overall planning of the ETH2.0 roadmap is to be fully realized, it will take about 3 to 5 years.
As ETH2.0 has taken a critical step, as the most important part of it, participating in staking or running validator nodes has become the focus of attention in the industry, and a new wave of wealth effects seems to be in sight, attracting many investors. At present, digital currency exchanges such as Huobi, Binance, and OKEx, blockchain wallets such as TokenPocket and imToken, and blockchain infrastructure service providers such as InfStones, Stkr, and RocketPool have all launched their own ETH2.0 pledge mining services.
According to data from OKLink, as of 13:57 on December 4, the current ETH2.0 mortgage address balance exceeded 1 million ETH, and 31,252 addresses have completed the mortgage of 32ETH.
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ETH advances into the 2.0 era
As a public blockchain platform for "cryptocurrency and decentralized applications", ETH's smart contract function has greatly changed the blockchain world.
However, in the past three years, the development of ETH has been ups and downs. On the one hand, after the "ICO" bubble burst, countless investors lost their money, and ETH fell into a long night; on the other hand, ETH2. Its future is filled with big question marks. It is precisely because of various uncertainties that the industry is full of complex emotions about the future of ETH.
Faced with doubts, "painting cakes" still depends on "making cakes".
In order to become a decentralized global computer and replace the ultimate goal of various centralized applications, ETH has set its long-term roadmap to four stages since its birth, namely Frontier (frontier), Homestead (homestead) , Metropolis (metropolis), Serenity (tranquility).
It is currently the final stage of ETH, namely the Serenity stage of ETH 2.0. According to its plan, ETH2.0 will be a completely revised and redesigned new network system, with four main changes: first, the consensus mechanism will be changed from PoW to PoS; second, the ETH 2.0 network has a beacon chain and 1024 Shard chain; third, the native token ETH will be destroyed, and ETH2.0 will use the new token BETH, and the two will be exchanged in a 1:1 manner; fourth, Staking will become one of the powerful functions of Ethereum 2.0, and users will become Verifier node, and get BETH rewards.
It should be noted that ETH2.0 will not be realized at one time, but will be divided into three phases, namely Phase 0 (Phase 0), Phase 1 (Phase 1), and Phase 2 (Phase 2), which are in a state of parallel advancement. Among them, Phase 0 is mainly based on the beacon chain and has been officially launched at 20:00 on December 1st; Phase 1 is mainly based on sharding, which mainly involves writing data in the sharding chain while achieving validity and consensus; 2 will start the integration of the system, and the new virtual machine (eWASM) supports the execution of accounts, contracts, and states.
Kosala Hemachandra, founder and CEO of MyEtherWallet, said that ETH2.0 still has a long way to go. Basically, after the launch of the beacon chain, ETH will focus on phase 1 specifications and will go through many phase 0-like developments. Iterations and lots of bugfixes.
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Staking continues to rise
ETH 2.0 pledge has had a profound impact on ETH. "Blue Fox Notes" stated that the new attributes of ETH's production means will make it more scarce in the future.
After the launch of the ETH 2.0 beacon chain, due to the change of the "consensus mechanism", the original right to obtain the right to process transactions through the competition of computing power has been changed, and the "activities" such as transactions will be verified by the operating verifier node.
As a node of ETH 2.0, you need to pledge 32ETH as a deposit, responsible for verifying and organizing new blocks, ensuring block continuity and obtaining corresponding "rewards". Currently, only the transfer from ETH1.0 to ETH2.0 is supported, and the reverse operation is not supported.
It has to be said that from the perspective of ETH supply and demand, the launch of the ETH2.0 beacon chain has undoubtedly deepened the impact of pledge mining on ETH.
Xu Kun, Chief Strategy Officer of OKEx, believes in the evolution of "The Opportunities and Impacts of ETH2.0" that the opening of ETH2.0 has brought about changes in circulation. At present, POW mining will issue an additional 4.2 million ETH per year. EthHub has estimated the annual additional issuance of BETH, as shown in the table below. In addition, if the verifier is punished, the actual additional issuance will be smaller than this figure.
According to Vitalik’s estimation, the amount of pledges on the beacon chain will reach 10 million ETH. In the next 1 to 2 years, the overall issuance of ETH (including ETH1.0 and 2.0) will be about 4.7 million per year. At present, the total amount of ETH is about 113 million. According to the annual increase of 4.7 million, by the end of next year, the total amount will reach about 118 million.
It is worth mentioning that, as of December 3rd, Eastern Time, Grayscale’s ETH trust holdings increased by 47,278, and the total holdings were close to 2.8 million ETH; as of December 6th, the total amount of DeFi pledges was about 6.81 million ETH. Analysts believe that these two parts do not actually belong to the category of free circulation, and these two sets of figures are likely to continue to expand.
In view of this, investors in the currency circle are generally optimistic about the price of ETH currency, and some people even shouted 1000USDT/ETH.
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The service provider market is popular
In recent days, ETH2.0 pledged mining services have rapidly become popular in the currency circle.
On December 6, ETH developer Philippe Castonguay tweeted that even if the U.S. government were able to shut down every ETH node in the United States, there would still be about 8,000 nodes worldwide, which is less than the total number of ETH nodes we had a few months ago. need more. Additionally, ETH 2.0 creates a significant incentive for people to run nodes, which is probably why the network has seen a 40% increase in nodes over the past few months. The more validators that join the competition, the stronger the network will be, and this is just the beginning.
However, analysts believe that due to the special requirements for validator nodes in ETH2.0, the entry threshold has been raised to a certain extent, which promotes the demand for ETH2.0 pledged mining services in the market. At present, digital currency exchanges such as Huobi, Binance, and OKEx, blockchain wallets such as TokenPocket and imToken, and blockchain infrastructure service providers such as InfStones, Stkr, and RocketPool have all launched their own ETH2.0 pledge mining services.
For example, Huobi Global announced on November 30 that it will support the ETH 2.0 verification node pledge function, and launched the ETH 2.0 one-click pledge function. Through this function, users can pledge ETH to BETH with one click, and participate in the pledge mining of ETH 2.0. Huobi Global will choose the opportunity to open BETH transactions according to the pledge situation.
Huobi Research Institute believes that more blockchain technology service providers are expected to provide similar services in the future. It not only lowers the participation threshold of ETH2.0, but also allows users to participate in pledge conveniently, and solves the problem of assets being locked. coming liquidity issues. Judging from the current trend, it is inevitable for large suppliers to provide ETH2.0 pledged mining services. The curtain of the Ethereum staking ecology.
Xu Kun said that there are three main modes of ETH2.0 pledge service, namely node technology service, collective pledge of retail investors, and decentralized matching. The first type is to provide technical services for node construction, which is aimed at users who hold 32 ETH; the second type is for users who do not meet the 32 ETH, collective mining, similar to a mining pool model; the third type, some DeFi platforms are nodes Operators and ETH holders are matched.
Huobi Institute reminds investors that when investors pledge their ETH to the ETH2.0 network, they cannot transfer their ETH, nor can they redeem it. This needs to wait until the second phase of ETH2.0 is launched before it can be circulated. According to the developer's estimate, this process will take about 2 years. This means that staking users participating in ETH 2.0 need to lock their positions for about 2 years.
